Andrew Farmer, Clontech to Speak at Single Cell Analysis Meeting, May 22-23, 2014, in Cambridge, MA

Cambridge, MA, March 30, 2014 --(PR.com)-- Andrew Farmer, Vice President of Research and Development of Clontech Libratory presentation titled, “Unravel the message in your cell(s) with the power of RNA-Seq and SMARTTM technology,” at the Inaugural Single Cell Analysis Conference to be held in Cambridge, MA on May 22-23, 2014 by GTC.

Dr. Farmer obtained his undergraduate degree in physiology from Oxford University. He went on to do his doctoral studies there, working on the control of liver differentiation with Dr. Stephen Goss at the Dunn School of Pathology. On coming to the USA in 1990, Dr. Farmer did post-doctoral research in the field of tumor suppressor genes; working first with Dr. Eric Stanbridge at UC, Irvine and later on BRCA1 with Dr. Wen-Hwa Lee at the Institute for Biotechnology in San Antonio Tx. Dr Farmer joined Clontech in 1998 as developing scientist for the Tet-Systems. As director of Cell and Molecular Biology, he was responsible for the development of several of Clontech's product lines, including: two-hybrid systems, viral expression systems, inducible expression systems, cell biology products, fluorescent reporters, In-Fusion Cloning, and the RNAi product line.

Dr. Farmer’s talk will discuss how next Generation Sequencing (NGS) has empowered a deeper understanding of biology by enabling RNA expression analysis over the entire transcriptome with high sensitivity and dynamic range. A particularly powerful application within this field is single cell transcriptome analysis, which has enabled researchers to unmask key properties of individual cells and has thus rapidly gained importance in fields such as cancer, development, neurobiology, and stem cell research.

By utilizing the template switching activity of reverse transcriptase, Clontech’s patented SMART™ technology provides methods that enable researchers to obtain answers from their most challenging samples, including single cell analysis, for which it has become the gold standard technology. This presentation will cover the application of SMART technology to single cell analysis as well as outline other recent advances in the technology that have extended SMART’s applicability to non-coding RNA and mRNA from degraded samples, such as FFPE, as well as methods to generate strand-specific libraries.

For more information, please visit www.gtcbio.com/singlecellanalysis